Author: alexandramarch

Desire & Procrastination

PRESS RELEASE

What’s desired in the Vita Nova associated with the Work is a particular type of time, a particular kind of daily temporality; the writer must, almost despite himself, bind himself to a time with no rough patches, no “disturbances”…indeed, what he wants—an almost mystical, paradisical desire—is a smooth time: a time with no endpoint, with no expiration date, which contains, for instance, no appointments, no “things to do” to interrupt the thing to be done… (Barthes: 2011/216)

Alex March and Jane Harris would like to invite you to consider how, when and where an artist makes work.

Using a wry reading of Roland Barthes’ The Preparation of The Novel to reflect on the process of making (or not making), Jane Harris is producing a series of over 300, (not quite identical), slip-cast porcelain pots using plaster moulds taken from Barthes’ favourite dessert, the Crème Caramel.

In a desperate attempt to get her work-shit together, before giving up on art completely and blaming her children, she has taken on a mind-numbingly dull, time-based study in porcelain, (a suitably neurotic material). Just like Barthes’ lecture course, where the outcome is the preparation itself, the process of committing time to these relentlessly awkward pots will become the event.

At the time of writing, Harris is at the ‘stuck’ phase of the project. She has no choice, but to carry on, ‘as if’(Barthes: 20) it is all going to be ok…

Alex March’s installation presents the accumulated evidence of her sporadic making. Small and large collage and paper pieces which reflect on a practise rooted in and often disturbed by the domestic. These pieces will be brought together in the space as part of the process of installing as she goes in search of smooth time.